The Register

Guaranteed Telecom, Met Technologies nurse £35k penalty, and to them that's meaningful Ofcom has slapped two small telcos, Guaranteed Telecom and Met Technologies, with a financial penalty for switching the home phone services of more than 100 people without their knowledge or consent.…

Which, alongside its £20-a-pop COVID-19 tests, isn't a great look If you're paying for a vital service such as a COVID-19 test when travelling abroad, it's reasonable to expect it to be backed by an approved app from one of the major app stores. However not if that test is from health lab Randox.…

Saving the planet is sexier than the next iPhone Opinion War! Huh! What is it good for? Our survey said: absolutely nothing.…

Submission to USA's call for chip supply chain warns on 'blunt interventions', making it far more colorful than most Google has suggested the US government's National Institute of Standards and Technology develop standards for some silicon, in hopes of improving the semiconductor supply chain.…

For when a terse email just won't do Who, Me? Passive aggression lurks in today's tale from the Who, Me? archives, replete with naughty words and cartoon scribblings of a corporate life satirist.…

Shall we call it Die-Fi? Or NoTooth? Either would be unkind, as this experiment used little radiation, but much exotic hardware Boffins from the UK's Lancaster University and the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia have transmitted and received data wirelessly using nuclear radiation.…

One company for devices, one for office kit, another for infrastructure, batteries & tech services, Kioxia stake to be sold Japanese industrial giant Toshiba has announced it will divide into three companies, and that its governance needs a thorough overhaul.…

Looks like feuding hackers wanted to expose Feds' failings as a public service. We want to believe The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has admitted that a software misconfiguration let parties unknown send email from its servers.…

Emperor Penguin rates Memory Folios tech – source of that performance bump – as most important new feature in 'not huge' release Linus Torvalds has loosed the first release candidate for version 5.16 of the Linux kernel.…

Thousands of servers, hundreds of thousands of IP addresses used by scammer to drum up $7m in fake web advert impressions Aleksandr Zhukov, a Russian national and the self-proclaimed "king of fraud," this week received a 10-year prison sentence for carrying out a $7m digital ad fraud scheme.…

Ability to block 'view source' for specific URLs hasn't actually worked for years Future Chromium-based browsers under administrative control will be able to prevent users from viewing webpage source code for specific URLs, a capability that remained unavailable to enterprise customers for the past three years until a bug fix landed earlier this week.…

What a difference a year makes? It took Apple less than a year to seemingly start undoing decades of x86 and Intel dominance in the traditional PC chip market.…

And they had a wildcard cert too. Still feeling secure? Black Hat Europe An astonishing piece of vulnerability probing gave infosec researchers a way into to Microsoft's management controls for Azure Cosmos DB – with full read and write privileges over customer databases.…

Auto-restart or manual update requires manual interaction to bring a gadget back to the light Some Samsung phones managed by Microsoft Intune are dropping out of compliance after an automatic restart or update, the Windows giant has admitted.…

Reflected light points to Moon-like material on recently discovered rock A freshly discovered train-sized rock that tags along with Earth as a constant companion orbiting the Sun is most likely a fragment of the Moon resulting from an ancient lunar impact.…

Call that an outage? Now this is an outage Updated Customers of BT tentacle Plusnet are still finding themselves without email after issues with the service entered a third day.…

At the same time, Brit MPs call for tighter regulations on AI snooping An explosion in workplace monitoring during the pandemic – in part supported by common software tools from global vendors – threatens to erode trust in employers and employees' commitment to work, according to a European Commission research paper.…

Loved by users, impenetrable to others, but 6.0 update aims to change that F# designer Don Syme said this week that the new version, 6.0, aims to be "more normal as a language" in order to improve take-up.…

Eye-catching claim in an eye-catching case Autonomy's former chief financial officer has alleged the firm collapsed partly because two financial analysts agreed to badmouth it in the hope of making a profit from its demise.…

Prolonged outage in Europe and beyond dampens productivity If you struggled to get into your Gmail this morning, it wasn't just you. Unhappy users from Europe all the way to South Africa reported a significant outage.…

Everything but catching the thing: Rocket Lab prepares for recovery Interview New Zealand's Rocket Lab is set to launch another Electron rocket - a precursor to the rocketeer's first attempt at catching a descending booster. The Register caught up with CEO Peter Beck to discuss helicopters, Mars and visiting Venus.…

Because Windows is what Linux users really want, right? Facing rising demand for high-end Linux boxes but also issues supporting the software on its high-end kit, HP is trying solve the problem for customers by using Windows as a universal shim.…

Weekend upgrade shows how many MoD staff made personal use of tech On Call A reader takes us back to a bygone era, when Blighty's brass inhabited wood-panelled offices, and the air was thick with pipe smoke and WW2 anecdotes. Welcome to On Call.…

The 'pre-process data on the edge' idea turns out not to be that simple A new buzzphrase crossed your correspondent's desk: "Computing First Networking."…

Think of an attack – DDOS, arbitrary code execution, memory corruption – and one of these problems allows it Microsoft may have given us a mere 55 CVEs to worry about on November's Patch Tuesday, but AMD and Intel have topped that number with fixes for their products.…

FCC Commissioner said the act closes the “Huawei loophole” US President Joe Biden has signed The Secure Equipment Act yesterday, legislation that prevents US regulators from even considering the issuance of new telecom equipment licenses for companies deemed security threats - which means the likes of China's Huawei and ZTE .…

OpenEuler now an Open Atom Foundation project, China Telecom has released a cut, tech minister loves the idea Huawei has donated the cut of Linux it created to run on its cloud, and silicon, to China's only open source foundation.…

Chocolate Factory's cross-platform framework seems to struggle to craft efficient desktop software Google's Flutter cross-platform app framework appears to have a thinking problem: in certain situations, Flutter desktop apps consume too much processing power.…

Google searches reportedly produce applicants' personal information The Philippines' Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has disabled its online passport application tracker, citing a "data privacy issue" and hinting that information could have leaked.…

Plus: Trips now more expensive in the UK to woo new drivers, tackle demand The US government sued Uber this week, claiming the ride-hailing app giant unfairly charges disabled riders waiting fees if they need extra time to get into vehicles.…

The days of redirecting microsoft-edge: links to a non-Redmond browser are, for now, over Microsoft Windows 11 build 22494 appears to prevent links associated with the Microsoft Edge browser from being handled by third-party applications, a change one developer argues is anticompetitive.…

Journalists' book claims company was targeted for Middle Eastern data Jointly US-Dutch owned Booking.com was illegally accessed by an American attacker in 2016 – and the company failed to tell anyone when it became aware of what happened, according to explosive revelations.…

Have a gander at la République's open-source inner workings Le Gouvernement de la République française – the government of France for Anglophones – has published a website containing 9,067 repositories of FOSS software created by 1,022 organisations and groups in the French public sector.…

Firm to build Cray supercomputer to better grapple with 'new, dynamic weather patterns caused by climate change' Hewlett Packard Enterprise has bagged a contract to build a supercomputer for the United Weather Centres – West, the remit being to help improve the accuracy of forecasts in Northern Europe.…

Arbitrary code execution by unauthenticated attacker? Big oops Updated Palo Alto Networks (PAN) has issued a patch for a CVSS 9.8-rated buffer overflow affecting a VPN component of its widely used firewall software, warning that the flaw allows unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code on unpatched appliances.…

Containerised Podman and OpenJDK 17 also highlights of minor release Version 8.5 of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux operating system (RHEL) is out, with updates including .NET 6 and a system role for Microsoft SQL Server, as well as improved container support.…

Uswitch's survey may surprise you – or not. Depends how much you like Reddit UK-based price comparision and broadband swapping service Uswitch has totted up the figures and come up with a surprising candidate for most outage incidents in 2021.…

New features focused on times series and analytics fail to quell concerns over 5.0 bugs MongoDB, the company behind the document non-relational database of the same name, has released its 5.1 update but only as a managed service.…

Indian challenger looks to exploit common platform but could struggle to win bigger customers SaaS newcomer Freshworks – said to be challenging Salesforce and ServiceNow – has launched a package aimed at startups and new IT helpdesk tech but is still struggling to get to grips with the enterprise food chain in its IPO year.…

Spending up while growth slows, as business app investment leads the charge EMEA – that zone of planet Earth existing only in the heads of business executives – is set to see total IT spending hit $1.3tn in 2022, up 4.7 per cent from 2021, according to Gartner.…

Mars Express wanted to demonstrate its relay smarts once again, but space agency mum on progress The European Space Agency (ESA) has made its first attempt to pick up data transmitted by the China National Space Administration's (CNSA) Zhurong rover for relay back to Earth.…

Extended support for 11.2.0.4.0 ended nearly a year ago Sheffield University's mission to create a new £30.4m student information management system – which saw its original design dropped last week after years of delay – stumbled on integrating corporate software running on an effectively out-of-support Oracle database.…

Or the government itself, of course It has been more than a month since the launch of the UK government's AI Strategy which, the authors said, "represents the start of a step-change for AI in the UK," and The Register, for one, has not forgotten.…

DoubleX static analyzer is doubleplusgood Security researchers from Germany's CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have developed software to help identify Chrome extensions that are vulnerable to exploitation by malicious webpages and other extensions.…

Begun, the Metaverse Wars have. And the metaverse will fight Facebook's attempts at domination Column The further we get from the sudden and spectacular pivot-and-rename of Facebook, the more it looks like the most spectacularly ill-conceived business decision of the 21st century.…

Founder Pony Ma reassures all he is proactively embracing new regulatory environment even as numbers take on less rosy hues After merrily speeding along for years, Chinese web giant Tencent has slowed to its lowest revenue growth since going public in 2004 - a dip that coincided with China imposing a raft of new regulations on its big internet companies.…

Joins 79 nations supporting Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace – China and Russia aren't on the list The United States has signed up for The Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace – an international effort to ensure the internet remains free and open, and an agreement to put critical infrastructure off limits to electronic attack by sovereign states and other actors.…

Kiwis are done with dishes, and the Five Eyes alliance is cool with it New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) – the nation's signals intelligence and infosec agency – will retire its Waihopai satellite communications interception station because it's no longer needed.…

Meanwhile, next crew of astronauts all set to launch on Thursday The International Space Station performed a short engine burn on Wednesday to avoid potentially hitting a chunk of space junk.…

Cupertino tells The Reg it will fight on Apple must allow apps in its iOS store to direct users to outside payment systems within the next 30 days, a federal judge in northern California reminded the super-corporation this week.…